Book Review - Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Late last year at (DDDNorth](https://twitter.com/dddnorth) my session had the title ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?’. Between anecdotes, a key theme was tha people too often don’t make sensible diagnostic steps. A problem caused, in my opinion, by the fact they have not been exposed to the fundamentals of how a computer works, due to the way computing is taught today, as opposed to how it was taught in my youth in the 80s...

January 11, 2023 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Duplicate Test DLLs with vstest.console.exe causes failures

The Problem I recently did our regular update of our Azure DevOps Private build agents. It is rare we see problems when we do this, but this time one of our very regularly run builds started to fail when running unit tests. We had not changed the project source code, all the test ran locally in Visual Studio. We had not change the build pipeline YAML - task: VSTest@2 displayName: 'Unit Tests - Services' inputs: testAssemblyVer2: | **\*....

January 9, 2023 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

GitHub agent Node version stops Hugo site build

The Problem I have blogged previously about moving various web sites over to become Hugo Static Sites. Recently one of my site’s, one using the tailwindscss module, GitHub Build and Deployment Workflow started failing with the following error: Start building sites … hugo v0.108.0-a0d64a46e36dd2f503bfd5ba1a5807b900df231d+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=2022-12-06T13:37:56Z VendorInfo=gohugoio Error: Error building site: POSTCSS: failed to transform "css/style.css" (text/css): node:internal/errors:478 ErrorCaptureStackTrace(err); ^ SystemError [ERR_SYSTEM_ERROR]: A system error occurred: uv_os_homedir returned ENOENT (no such file or directory) at Object....

December 16, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Updating my Azure DevOps Pipeline Task to Use the Node16 Runner

Background It is easy to create an Open Source Project and leave it to gather technical debt as the libraries it depends upon are updated. I have tried to keep on top of updating all my Azure DevOps Pipeline Extensions, and I have to say Dependabot has certainly helped, but I have not been as diligent as I might have been. So, as a Christmas project, I took the chance to start to do a major update of all my extensions....

December 13, 2022 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

You need a license to touch that (revised 18 years on)

“You need a license to touch that!”. The case for licensing of individuals within the software engineering profession. Background Back in 2004 I completed my BSc Degree in Computer Science at Bradford University; only 20 years after I started. My year in industry got out of hand! One module I did involved me writing a paper on a legal area concerning computing. I chose to discuss licensing of engineers. Whilst at the DDDNorth community conference last weekend (Dec 2022) I got chatting on aspects of staff development, problem solving and training with a fellow MVP Matteo Emili and I mentioned this paper I had written....

December 5, 2022 · 11 min · Richard Fennell